I just know there's a homeopathy joke in there somewhere...

You call that counterbalance?

What's keeping me, a rights owner of a movie that's a real stinker, from silencing everyone who dared to do a negative review of it by carpet bombing any and all media pages with takedown notices for those reviews?

The US learned that it's more profitable to wage than to win wars. At least for the elite few. It's really win-win in every aspect. You get the masses occupied with an external foe, you get the rabble off the street by dumping it into the army (and at the same time make them feel important because they're doing something important) and you can make the elite rich at the same time.

The US also has the economy to fuel the whole shit, unlike Germany in WW2. And also unlike Germany in WW2, they're not dumb enough to actually engage in a war with anyone who could actually fight back.

Really?

Fuck, the terrorists won, they're all over the US already!

Considering the price to develop something (along with the price of training the guy), I prefer a bunch of low cost religious nuts with AKs in their hands.

Hey, that's today's naming scheme. You take the meaning of a word, twist it around and create something that confuses the hell out of someone reading it.

It's called "political correctness".

The odd thing is that it is actually even likely that it's going to be more secure.

Once I have to turn for a communist country to get freedom I guess it's time to start drinking heavily.

Dear US: If you want to spy on yourself, more power to you. But we're not as dumb as you are.

signed, China.

Is it me or is the mere fact that they automated the takedown notices speaking volumes of how frivolous the whole matter has become? Take them all down and let God sort them out, or how is that supposed to be?

Am I the only one who thinks it's about time for some (serious) fines for frivolous takedown notices? It's not like they don't cost the media providers anything.

You could simply shoot whoever comes closer than the "stop and don't come closer or be shot" signs.

KISS, not everything needs a technical solution.

It got there using a buffer overflow in one of your outdated (read: 2 days since patch) software and also got executed that way. The downloader wrote it into your %appdata%\roaming folder (where it has write access without you needing elevated privileges) and got started likewise.

Why files in %appdata%\roaming can be run at all? Ask MS. I don't see a good reason why files located there should be executable. Actually, there are very few areas in user-writeable areas where execution of files makes sense, and not allowing it would increase security of Windows by leaps and bounds.

Sadly, you need at least Win7 Professional to make it so. Well, it is technically possible to get Win7 Home Premium to perform it, but the hassle is maybe not far away from having to reinstall the system and restore a backup if the malware strikes...

It already starts at you having to get that weapon platform to the point where you can fire it. You have to build the weapon platform, you have to build the targeting computer, and then you have to move that all to where you want to employ it. And all that to (hopefully) hit a person who may or may not be still there when you get there and who may or may not be an actual target for you.

In turn, your enemy just needs to send a suicide jockey to your well known base and blow up the checkpoint at the entrance. Even if you kill the first 9 guys it doesn't matter as long as the 10th makes it.

Well, it just MIGHT work to give people a reason not to hate the US and instead turn towards the shit that you don't want to go down. It worked like a charm after WW2, didn't it?

The cheapest way to retain the order that you want somewhere is to give the people there a reason to want it, too. That works great if you can show them the benefit of your way of life. Of course, that first of all requires that your way of life must have some benefit for them, though...

No, I'm not part of the military industrial complex.

I intend to win my wars. Not just get rich off them.

That's the key in asymmetric warfare. Basically what you need is:

- An expendable population that is not only willing to fight but also to die for you, your goal, your god, whatever.
- Cheap weapons (manpower is no issue, people are cheap)
- And enemy who doesn't have the two above.

If you can muster that, you have won. There is no way short of total annihilation that you could possibly lose.